‘Nor never shall, plaise God,’ exclaimed she, striding over, and advancing her profane hands to seize the dish, whilst I, holding it with one hand, motioned her off with the other, as I angrily desired her to leave the room, and leave me to my meal in peace. ‘Never, by the hob!’ exclaimed the determined vixen; ‘I’ll never quit till I get that thing in the dish; and here I’ll stay’--and there she staid in audacious determination. My mind began to misgive me that there was something the matter with what I was so pertinaciously defending; so I raised the cover of the dish. There lay a substance black as the ace of spades. ‘So, so!’ I began, ‘here is a fine morsel for a hungry man!--here’s frying with a vengeance! Woman, woman!’ cried I solemnly, and turning to my obtrusive companion with the dignity of a man who had received a mortal affront, but who yet hail some feeling of God-like charity--‘Woman, woman! is there never to be any dependence on your sex? I am wasted to a thread; I am worked to a skeleton; and I think this carcase hath need of a little indulgence on one day out of seven. I pay sixpence a pound for a tender, delicate rump-steak, and I call you in to superintend the dressing of it, decidedly telling you to have it done the colour of your own skin, and no darker (dark enough in all conscience). But here it is now--neither Bedford-brown, Vandyke-brown, Adelaide-brown, nor _Flanagan-brown_, but a sapless, fatless, cinder _black_! Nevertheless, such is my resignation under all trials, I shall endeavour to make a meal of it, if possible: do you but leave me in peace--vanish!’ and I muttered some words in Latin, and gave two or three figurative flourishes with my hands, by way of letting her think I was performing some important ceremony of the church, at which her absence would be necessary. But she stuck fast. ‘Why, thin, indeed, sur,’ she persisted, ‘if you war to praich Latin an’ Greek from this till mornin’, you’ll never convart an ould black wisted stockin’ into a beef-staik!’ ‘A what, woman, in the name of heaven!’ ‘I said it, sur--a black wisted stockin’ into a beef-staik.’ I stuck my fork into the black substance plentifully covered with onion and gravy. I held it up: it was long, and, like Italy, shaped like a boot; and however it might appertain to the leg, it had nothing whatever to do with the rump-steak I had bought in the morning.